PACT 2007 Tutorials & Workshops
The tutorials and workshops for PACT 2007 are listed below.
Registration for tutorials and workshops is handled through the PACT 2007 registration site.
Both half day and full day tutorials and workshops include lunch and breaks.
For workshop inquiries, please contact the Workshops Chair, Guang Gao
(ggao [at] capsl.udel.edu).
For tutorial inquiries, please contact the Tutorials Chair,
Avi Mendelson
(avi.mendelson [at] intel.com).
The tutorials and workshops will be held
on Saturday September 15 and Sunday 16
in the Aula of the
University Transilvania of Brasov.
(See the local information page
for details and directions.)
The lunches will be at the ARO Palace Hotel, and the
breaks will be at the Aula.
The daily schedule for the tutorials and workshops is as follows:
- 08:30-12:00: Morning Session
- 10:00-10:30: Morning Break
- 12:00-13:45: Lunch at the ARO Hotel (included with registration)
- 13:45-17:15: Afternoon Session
- 15:15-15:45: Afternoon Break
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PACT 2007 Tutorials & Workshops - Sunday, September 16, 2007
|
Tutorials Track
(Aula) |
Tutorials Track
(Aula) |
Tutorials Track
(Aula) |
Workshops Track
(Aula) |
Workshops Track
(Aula) |
T3 (full day):
Microarchitecture: Concepts, Tradeoffs, the Future
Instructor: Yale Patt (University of Texas, Austin)
|
T4 (morning):
Does Multicore Change the Way We Should Design Caches?
A Tutorial for Architects Interested the Nuts-and-Bolts of Future Cache Technologies
Instructor:
Hillery Hunter (IBM TJ Watson Research Center)
|
T5 (morning):
Building High Performance Threaded Applications using Libraries
or Why you don't need a parallel compiler.
Instructor:
Jim Cownie (Intel)
T7 (afternoon):
Transactional Programming in a Multi-core Environment
Instructors:
Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai (Intel),
Bratin Saha (Intel)
|
W4 (full day):
GREPS: GCC for Research in Embedded and Parallel Systems
Organizers:
Albert Cohen (INRIA, France),
Ayal Zaks (IBM Haifa Research Lab)
|
W5 (full day):
MEDEA: MEmory performance: DEaling with Applications, systems and architecture
Organizers:
Roberto Giorgi (University of Siena, Italy),
Cosimo Antonio Prete (University of Pisa, Italy),
Pierfrancesco Foglia (University of Pisa, Italy),
Sandro Bartolini (University of Siena, Italy)
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The tutorial will be organized into 4 sessions of approximately
90 minutes each.
The two morning sessions will focus on C++98, with the aim being to sharpen
and modernize C++ skills.
The two afternoon sessions will focus on C++0x, with the aim being
to present an overview of the upcoming standard.
C++98 - the aim of this half day is to sharpen and modernize C++ skills
Session 1: Speaking C++ like a native.
Multi-paradigm programming is programming applying different styles of programming,
such as object-oriented programming and generic programming, where they are most
appropriate. This talk presents simple example of individual styles in ISO Standard C++
and examples where these styles are used in combination to produce cleaner, more
maintainable code than could have been done using a single style only.
Session 2: C++ in Safety-Critical Systems.
C++ is widely used in embedded systems programming and even in safety-critical and
hard-real-time systems. This presentation discusses how to write code in these highly
demanding application areas. First, the mapping of C++ code to hardware resources is
reviewed and the basics abstraction mechanisms (classes and templates) are reviewed
from the perspective of this kind of code. Then, the JSF++ coding rules are examined as
an example of a set of domain specific rules. These rules have been and are being used
for the development of millions of lines of C++. Questions addressed include: "Can I use
templates in safety-critical code?" (Yes: You can and must.), and "Can I use exceptions
in hard-real time code?" (Sadly no, not with the current level of tool support.).
Predictability of language features and minimization of programmer mistakes are key
notions.
C++0x - the aim of this half day is to present an overview of the upcoming standard
Session 3: C++0x: an overview.
A good programming language is far more than a simple collection of features. My ideal
is to provide a set of facilities that smoothly work together to support design and
programming styles of a generality beyond my imagination. Here, I briefly outline rules
of thumb (guidelines, principles) that are being applied in the design of C++0x. Then, I
present the state of the standards process (we are aiming for C++09) and give examples
of a few of the proposals being considered in the ISO C++ standards committee. I'll
focus on general principles supported by minor examples. Features presented will include
general initializer lists, generalized constant expression, template aliases, and many
minor additions.
Session 4: C++0x: Concepts.
"Concepts" is C++0x's type system for C++ types, combinations of type, and
combinations of types of integers. They are introduce to allow programmers to directly
express a template's requirements on its template arguments and thereby a template's
requirements on its users. The result is greater expressiveness, better error handling,
without loss of performance or flexibility. Concepts is the major new language feature of
C++0x and will be central to the future development of generic programming.
Each session is timed to allow plenty of time for questions and answers.
This tutorial presents CellSim, a source-level compatible
modular simulator of the Cell processor architecture built on the
UNISIM platform. The modular nature of the simulator makes it very
flexible, and is targeted at wide exploration of heterogeneous chip
multiprocessors.
The first part of the tutorial will cover installation of
the simulator, generation of code for the simulator, and the actual
simulation of code.
The second part will deal with modification of the simulator to
explore changes in the architecture. Finally, we will cover joint
modifications to the simulator and the gcc compiler to explore ISA
extensions.
Process technology continues to deliver enormous capability on the
individual chip. In ten years, we expect 100 billion transistors
and a 10 GHz clock. The microarchitect's job: Harness that technology.
To date, we have done okay, but not good enough. Too many transistors
wasted in multiple cores that do not contribute or very large caches that
do not pay for themselves. Too much energy wasted. I believe there is
a better way, if we return to the fundamentals. I also believe that
the "better way" is equally valid for the general purpose desk top as
it is for the embedded processor. In this tutorial, my plan is to first
examine the fundamental principles that impact microprocessor performance
in the future environment of 100 billion transistor chips running at
10 GHz. From there, I plan to discuss current and planned mechanisms for
exploiting chip resources. Finally, I plan to describe what I believe
will characterize the microarchitecture of microprocessors of the year
2017. Those are my plans. But, if previous tutorials are any predictor
of future tutorials, the plan will be interrupted many times by questions
from the attendees and digressions from the instructor. As to questions
from the attendees, they are welcome at any time. As to digressions by
the instructor, they tend to enrich the lectures. Besides, there doesn't
seem to be any way to keep him from doing it.
- Part 1: Overview: the fundamentals, the challenges, and the tradeoffs.
Why so many cores? What are the main constraints to performance?
- Part 2: Mechanisms, compile time, run time, and both. For example,
branch prediction, predication, trace cache, block strutured
ISA, transactional memory.
- Part 3: The latest chips (Pentium M, Cell, Barcelona.) and what
we can infer from them.
- Part 4: The microarchitecture of the year 2017.
As technology moves forward, innovative advancements will rely on
researchers at the architecture, compiler, and software levels becoming
familiar with the bottlenecks of silicon scaling. Two trends are of
particular note: (1) In many microprocessor families, increasing amounts
of silicon area are being devoted to caches, and (2) Technology
variability is causing stability concerns for our fundamental cache
building block - six-transistor SRAM. For each of these concerns,
there are aggravating factors present in many proposed multicore designs:
(1) Where die size is kept relatively equal to that of prior generations,
inclusion of multiple cores, even if lighter-weight, often leaves
less silicon area available for caches;
(2) Many proposals suggest complex multi-voltage management schemes, to
deal with power consumption, thus aggravating and complicating
circuit-level challenges in the face of increasing transistor-level variability.
In light of these factors, this tutorial will examine the fundamentals of
cache design, and alternatives to six-transistor SRAM.
The tutorial will take a nuts-and-bolts approach, explaining how bits are
stored in cache cells, which are composed into arrays, and then joined
with logic and management to form the caches we simulate at the
architectural level. Discussion will center on circuit and technology
properties which correlate to metrics commonly understood at the
architecture level: cache capacity, cache access latency, and cache
distance from the CPU.
Multi-threaded programming has been used in the software industry to
improve the responsiveness of GUI applications, to improve the throughput
of network based applications, and to reduce the turnaround time of
compute bound applications through the use of parallelism. With the
current trend to multi-core chips the use of multi-threading to exploit
the performance of even laptop hardware is becoming ever more important.
To help the software industry to expand its use of multithreading, Intel
has been pushing the development of tools, languages and libraries which
make it easier to write multi-threaded code. Most current threaded
programs use either direct calls to an underlying thread library (pthreads
or winthreads), or language extensions such as OpenMP*. Intel(r) Threading
Building Blocks (Intel(r) TBB) is a C++ template library that provides an
interesting alternative to these two approaches that has many benefits.
This tutorial will introduce the library approach, and compare it with
both OpenMP and native threads, explaining how code implemented with the
Intel(r) TBB library achieves efficiency without requiring parallel language
extensions in the compiler.
Since July 2007 Intel(R) TBB has been available under the GPL, so this
tutorial should be of interest to programmers on all platforms.
Registered attendees at this tutorial will receive a free copy of
the O'Reilly book
Intel Threading Building Blocks, which has a
list price of $34.99.
Tutorial T6 has been cancelled.
Tutorial T6:
Design Challenges of the Development Tools to Exploit Parallelism
Offered by Embedded Multicore Systems
Instructors:
Viet Ngo (Freescale Semiconductor Inc.),
Simona-Sorina Costinescu (Freescale Semiconductor, Romania),
Vladimir Cambrea (Freescale Semiconductor, Romania),
Adrian Gancev (Freescale Semiconductor, Romania),
Mihail Nistor (Freescale Semiconductor, Romania)
Half Day (Afternoon), Sunday, September 16, 2007
Multicore solutions hybrid or homogeneous are widely used for embedded
systems in symmetric and asymmetric programming models. Tools for
debugging concurrent applications on these environments are facing the
variety of targets and OS combinations and the need of keeping shared
resources synchronized. The DSP world imposes additional challenges on
the applications to run faster, in a restricted memory space and power
consumption.
The tutorial presents hardware techniques exemplified on Linux kernel for
Freescale dual core Power Architecture MPC8641D, techniques to speed up
various DSP algorithms, the industry approach implemented in the Starcore
compiler for two homogenous multicore DSP platforms, and explores
systematic modeling frameworks for multicore support.
With single thread performance starting to plateau, HW architects have
turned to chip level multiprocessing (CMP) to increase processing power.
All major microprocessor companies are aggressively shipping multi-core
products in the mainstream computing market. Moore's law will largely be
used to increase HW thread-level parallelism through higher core counts
in a CMP environment. CMPs bring new challenges into the design of the
software system stack.
In this tutorial, we will talk about the shift to multi-core
processors, and the programming implications. In particular, we will
focus on transactional programming. Transactions have emerged as a
promising alternative to lock-based synchronization that eliminates many
of the problems associated with lock-based synchronization. For example,
transactions eliminate deadlock, allow read sharing, provide
fine-grained concurrency, and enable safe composition of atomic
primitives. We will discuss the design of hardware and software
transactional memory and quantify the tradeoffs between the different
design points. We will show how to extend the Java and C languages with
transactional constructs, and how to integrate transactions with
compiler optimizations and the language runtime (e.g., memory manager
and garbage collection).
